SPAC takes part in NetSciX 2022
Last week, we attended the International School and Conference on Networks Science 2022 in Porto, our first in-person conference since the beginning of the pandemic. Lília Perfeito (PostDoc at SPAC) gave a talk on the dynamics of information spread on Twitter, and Sara Mesquita (PhD student) presented her poster about the changes in online behaviour during COVID-19. More details on the presentations available here.
Our work presented at CCS 2021
On October 26th, we presented two of our projects at the Conference on Complex Systems 2021. One described a model of information spread that does not rely on information on the the underlying network and shows how Tweets can be a good quantitative model for studying cultural evolution. The other was on how excess confidence can explain negative attitudes towards science, including a new metric to gauging confidence. You can find more details about the presentations here.
João Loureiro and Pedro Duarte join SPAC
João Loureiro and Pedro Duarte, two Physical Engineering students at IST, will join SPAC for their MSc thesis. João will be working on forecasting and now-casting emergency unit admissions, while Pedro will be focusing on social network modelling.
SPAC is hiring 2 Junior Developers
We are looking for Junior Programmers who would like to join our team. More info here.
We presented our latest research on spreading of respiratory viruses at IC2S2
Last July, we joined the 7th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) and talked about our work on non-flu respiratory viruses. We discussed a computational approach which uses epidemiological data, weather data, and Google search trends, to gain insights into the impact of climate in nowcasting models for non-influenza respiratory viruses. You can find more details here.
Our research on information spread on twitter at Networks 2021
On July 8th, we attended Networks 2021 to present our most recent model of information spread on twitter and discuss how Twitter can be a good quantitative model to study cultural evolution. More details here.
Joana Gonçalves de Sá wins Inspiring Women Award
SPAC group leader Joana Gonçalves de Sá received the Activa Inspiring Women 2020 Award, in the Science category. You can read more about Joana’s speech, focusing on diversity in Science, here (Portuguese only).
ECIR 2020 Keynote – Joana Gonçalves de Sá
On April 14th, Joana Sá gave a keynote presentation at ECIR 2020 (42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval), titled “Focusing the macroscope: how we can use data to understand behavior”.
Our work was accepted for presentation at the CSS_2019
Lília presenting our work at the CSS_2019 in Zurich. Paulo, Lília and Manuel Pita have been analysing the past 40 years of Portuguese democracy and uncovered some interesting differences in voting and discourse.
Three of our projects were accepted for presentation at the IC2S2_2019
Joana presented three of our ongoing projects at the IC2S2 in Amsterdam (July 2019). This is the main conference in computational social sciences, where both social and computational scientists get to interact and learn about each other’s methods.
